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Fink Maintainer Steps Down Due To GPL Infringment
DShadow noted that
the Fink maintainer Christoph Pfisterer has resigned
largely because of GPL violations by openosx and macgimp, as well as macosx.forked.net.
There's definitely some tension between the mac world and the Open Source and GPL worlds. Certain amounts of culture clash are inevitable, but hopefully great projects like this will continue, and commercial vendors will be able to play nice without alienating developers. The good news for Macheads is that fink will continue just fine.
It would be perfectly legal for me to grab a copy of the Linux source code, rip out all the credits as to who did what work, and release my new OS "Brianux". This would be reprehensible (and for the record, I have no intention of actually doing this, so save your flames)- but perfectly legal so long as I released the source.
Before anyone starts bashing the macosx.forked.net guys, let's keep a few things in mind:
1) There's nothing wrong with charging for access to files. You pay your ISP, right?
2) Apex *is*, apparently, working to comply with the GPL. From what I've read in the past on his site, he works in the commercial fishing industry up in Alaska. I would imagine that his time to work on the site and the packages is limited.
3) Apex has been very helpful in the past on the forums hosted on his server. Lots of people have requested ports of software (some of which are difficult) and he has come through for them.
Chris
Personally, I'm sad to see him go, but hope he'll be back eventually. I understand his frustration with the "community" but hope he notices all of us who forgot to say how much we appreciated his work before he left.
I think I'm gonna' make a bumper sticker: "Have you hugged an Open Source Programmer today?"
There is no evidence of any real GPL infringement here. I urge SlashDot readers, especially the kneejerk "GPL good, Apple bad" crowd, to read the conversations at the indicated links and make up their own minds:
1) OpenOSX appears to be distributing source code on their CDs, and now gives credit to fink on the MacGIMP CD web page.
2) Macosx.forked.net has also posted credit to fink on the home page web site, as well as indicating their intention to address GPL issues.
Apparently Pfisterer is irritated in part because they were slow to give fink credit; but as others have pointed out, that's not a GPL violation.
Following the other links he includes in his "resignation letter" suggests that he's quick to get irritated -- especially when people point this out to him (cf. the "abiword" thread). Perhaps there are other things going on in his life, and this isn't a good time for him to lead an open-source project. Fine. Kudos to him for leaving his ball behind instead of taking it with him.
But the article title ("Fink Maintainer Steps Down Due To GPL Infringment") is misleading at best. Even Pfisterer didn't make this claim.
The website Wayback Machine allows you to see the way website looked in the past. For example:
macosx.forked.net in September or
slashdot.org from 1998.
Steven Murdoch.
web: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/
Well, the Lawyer for the Free Software Foundation says he enforces the GPL all the time by threatening to sue and companies always back down because the GPL is so easy to enforce. The point is that the GPL grants the customer rights that do not exist under standard copyright law. If you re-distribute a work based on someone else's copyrighted code and you then challenge the GPL then you are in for a big-time copyright violation. If the GPL is invalid, you had no right to the code in the first place!
The GPL license offers a very beautiful dream, free, unrestricted access to software for the people of the world. No doubt this would be great, free technology for people in the third world countries (including me) and no more gigantic monopolistic companies telling you where to go today. I also believed in that dream, however I tried FreeBSD because I wanted to see how the traditional UNIX was. I could have tried NetBSD but I simply had a contact with FreeBSD first. FreeBSD has only one distribution and, of course, includes many GPL'd programs, something that shows without doubt that BSD hackers don't "hate" the GPL as a general rule, in fact, there is a sense of respect towards of the code written by the FSF and any comment against the GPL starts a never ending flame war in the lists.
:), and I am not going to analyze the answers RMS gave because that is not the objective of this article. I arrived, however, to two important conclusions:
I then decided to follow my ideals, and some years ago I pursued some email with Richard Stallman (RMS for short) on three issues:
1) The Free Software Foundation should support the efforts against crypto export restrictions in the US. It was suspected some linux distributions were exporting this code but there was no official statement on this.
He (RMS) agreed that such restrictions were against the spirit of free software redistribution. He included a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the Free Software Foundation's site.
2)During our email, he insisted I should use the term GNU/Linux, something that sounded perfectly logical although somewhat uncomfortable. I then asked if I could use the term GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/AIX (I used AIX with a complete GNU development system since those parts were unbundled by IBM) since I was using GNU components that were much bigger and equally important (at least to me) as the kernel.
RMS responded on both cases with a clear " no".
3) I commented that, given the FSF's objectives, FreeBSD was doing a better job than Linux.
He (and no doubt many readers) was surprised by this affirmation and asked for an explanation. I reasoned that since the objective behind the FSF was providing free software, and Linux was being heavily commercialized while FreeBSD was not, FreeBSD was nearer to the objectives. In those days, the newly born Caldera's distribution had a lot of commercial goodies and their base distribution couldn't be downloaded anywhere, I also commented that no one could stop the companies like Caldera from gradually replacing free parts of GNU/Linux with commercial elements until they would effectively replace the complete OS (I also mentioned the linux emulation in BSD in another context). To this final point, RMS responded that the only thing we could do was write more free software.
Nowadays I personally think that Richard Stallman is a good person but he is confused (I hope he thinks the same of me when he finishes reading this article
the GNU Public License will not save the world,
there shouldn't be a universal license; different situations require different licenses.
Fink is a port of the debian package management tools combined with a source based install system. By defauly many Open Source tools need a few tweaks to get them to compile on Mac OS X. Fink automated those tweaks. So you can just use apt/dselect to get software installed, of use 'fink install xxx' and have it automatically download compile and install the software (making a deb file in the process). And it does it without clobbering any of the default system (unlike GNU Darwin - grrr).
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
Why are people saying that this isn't a GPL violation?
Because it isn't.
You must provide a copy of the source code when you redistribute software that is under the GPL license.
Read this exchange. The source for fink was included, along with the source for bzip, tar, etc. etc.
Not only that, but they were both charging for the software that they basically just downloaded and repackaged.
Show me the part of the GPL that forbids charging for software.
Furthermore, i'm pretty sure both parties violated parts A, B, and C of section 2.
Oh really? Which part? From reading the exchange between Christoph and Jeshua, There doesn't seem to be any issue of modifying code, but instead a matter of giving credit. There is no part of Section 2 that deals with that issue.
What?
Recently, maybe, but take a look at this link to a copy of the 1993 g++ FAQ:
The FSF didn't end the boycott of Apple until 1995, and even then, they pretty much said that unless supporting MacOS was ridiculously easy, they wouldn't bother accepting patches because that might impact their effort to produce the "GNU operating system".
If you want a quick summary of the boycott, the reasons, and how the FSF eventually "forgave" Apple the same way he "forgave" KDE, you can check out this link. Frankly, I'm surprised that the FSF and Apple are managing to get along as well as they are; it speaks volumes about Apple's commitment, and about the way the FSF has matured over the years, as well.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
The fink author should talk to Warren Robinette, the author of Adventure for the 2600. Or in a more recently example, speak to the authors of anything coming from Apple.
1 1/msg00086.html).
What these people have in common with the author of Fink is that they wrote software for which they didn't receive obvious credit (Apple recently removed credits so that people couldn't target specific Apple employees for recruitment to another software house). Just as not getting specific credit is written into Apple employees' contracts and was written into Atari programmers (one reason so many of the best worked for Activision), the "contract" your essentially "sign" when releasing GPL software doesn't have any provisions to retain who did the work.
One might take a cue from Mr. Robinette and include something in the code that gives you specific credit -- he created the first easter egg in a video game that displayed his name on the screen as the game's author (take a look at the end of the decompiled source to the game. Download the zip on this page: http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/2001
Or one might take an even better cue from those who worked for Activision: If it's key for you to receive credit for your work, make sure it's in the contract!
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.